Headteachers and education sector leaders have warned that the impact of Covid on pupils is not over after GCSE results released today saw grades return closer to pre-pandemic levels.
The government has also been accused of failing to do enough to support education recovery as ministers said that the pandemic had added to the disadvantage gap.
Today, education secretary Gillian Keegan played down suggestions that the attainment gap was growing in secondary schools but admitted it had “taken a step back” in recent years. Schools minister Nick Gibb said that Covid had “undone the progess” the government had made over the previous decade.
The proportion of GCSE entries awarded top grades in 2023 has fallen from last year but is slightly higher than before the Covid-19 pandemic.
The government and Ofqual had planned to return to pre-pandemic grades over two years after higher results based on centre- and teacher-assessed grades in 2020 and 2021, when exams were cancelled.
Sector leaders have today warned that although grading may have returned to pre-pandemic levels, the impact of Covid is not over.
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “We would caution against direct comparisons between this year’s grades and those in 2019 because of the disproportionate impact of the pandemic and subsequent cost-of-living crisis on young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.”
He added that the government had failed to “grasp the gravity of this issue and did not invest sufficiently in education recovery from the pandemic”.
The results have shown a widening gap between the proportion of higher grades being achieved in London and those being achieved in the rest of England.
This year’s results reveal that, as in 2019, the North East region received the lowest proportion of GCSE grades at 7/A or above (17.6 per cent), while London received the highest proportion (28.4 per cent). However, the North East was also the third most improved of the nine regions in England.
Catch-up too ‘London-centric’
Chris Zarraga, director of Schools North East, said the results showed the government’s catch-up programme had been “too London-centric”.
He said: “If you look at the increase in London compared with other regions, it also shows us that the Covid catch-up effort has not been sufficient and perhaps schools in London have been better placed to use tuition compared with a region like ours where the take up has been much lower and where the infrastructure is not in place.
“There is talk of getting back to pre-Covid grading but we need to move away from a short-termist view that the impact of the pandemic is something we can put behind us in one or two years.”
He said policymakers’ efforts now needed to be focused on the effect of the pandemic on pupils’ mental health and the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on disadvantaged communities.
There has also been debate today about the merits of returning to pre-pandemic grading levels given the impact of Covid.
Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the NEU teaching union, said: “The government acts as if the pandemic has had no after-effects. In fact, the damage it has done to students’ learning and wellbeing is enduring. Government decisions about grading boundaries have not done enough to take this into account.”
Imran Iqbal, headteacher of Holly Lodge High School, in Smethwick in the West Midlands, said: “I think we should all be looking at the young people as role models and be proud of them for getting these results. They have had a very disrupted journey and there are young people who will be disappointed.”
He added that the return to 2019 grading this year had been “too much too quickly…I think it’s short-sighted to think that in such a short period the effects of the pandemic were wiped out”.
Students and staff should be ‘lauded’ for performance
However, some school and trust leaders have praised Ofqual’s handling of the process.
Rebecca Boomer-Clark, chief executive of the Academies Enterprise Trust, said: “Behind the scenes, Ofqual and the exam boards have clearly been working hard to secure a soft landing to pre-pandemic levels, and I think we can see that has been effective.”
She said that for pupils in this cohort to have matched 2019 results was a significant achievement given that they only had one year of uninterrupted secondary education before the pandemic.
Mohsen Ojja, CEO of Anthem Schools Trust, also praised Ofqual: “Credit where credit’s due, as with last week Ofqual have delivered a smooth landing back to pre-pandemic grading just as they said they would”.
E-ACT chief executive Tom Campbell, meanwhile, said that he wanted to see this year’s students and staff that had supported them “lauded” for their “incredible resilience and academic progress despite a backdrop of disruption and all that the Covid era has brought”.
Lisa Walton, deputy chief executive of the East Midlands Education Trust, said that while she thought Ofqual had “done a good job”, she feels the disparity between approaches in England compared with Wales and Northern Ireland has been unfair to students.
She added that the trusts’ “disadvantage gap is definitely growing” and called on the government “to see what protections might be built in at post-18 for kids who don’t have a lot of 9s at GCSE if they go on to apply for, say, Russell Group universities”.
“I’d also want to know how the system will build in protections for our most vulnerable students at the cusp between grade 3s and 4s,” she added.
David Clayton, CEO of Endeavour Learning Trust, said, though, that while the “commentary today will, quite rightly, focus on the debate about the national picture and the move back to 2019 grade boundaries”, schools had focussed on “doing what they do best: wrapping their support round each individual child to support them to take their next steps into post-16 education and training”.
Recognition of pandemic’s impact on learning ‘crucial’
Becky Francis, chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, said that recognition of the impact of the pandemic on young people’s learning experiences behind their GCSEs is “really crucial”.
She added: “It’s important that we continue to support those young people, that gatekeepers are aware of the often inequitable impact of the pandemic that impacts these grade outcomes.”
Robin Walker, chair of the Commons Education Select Committee and former schools minister, said: “One of the things I’ve always been struck by in my time, both in the [DfE] and also on the select committee, is the biggest regional disparities that exist in the UK are between London and everywhere else when it comes to education - and that has been a stubborn and challenging disparity to try to shift.”
He added that it has to be acknowledged that the pandemic had a disproportionate effect on people from more disadvantaged backgrounds.
“That’s why there has to be a constant focus in education policy on closing that gap,” he said. “We’ve seen a range of initiatives - pupil premium, levelling-up premium and so forth - focused on that, but undoubtedly that work is nowhere near finished.”
Commenting on regional variations in results, Labour’s shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson said the government’s efforts to level up education are “dead and buried”.
“Young people who have worked so hard are being let down by a government that has no interest in shrinking attainment gaps or raising education standards and a prime minister who seems to have more interest in supporting American private colleges than schools in this country,” she said.
Commenting on today’s results, Ms Keegan said: “Congratulations to everyone receiving their results. This cohort has shown tremendous resilience in recent years and should be proud of all the work they’ve done to reach this milestone.
“Grading is returning to normal, which means a pupil who would have achieved a grade 4 before the pandemic is just as likely to achieve that this year.”
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “Tutoring is being offered to pupils on an unprecedented scale, with almost four million courses started through the National Tutoring Programme so far.
“The programme has levelled the playing field in tutoring, with pupils eligible for free school meals accounting for nearly 50 per cent of course starts, meaning tutoring is no longer reserved for those that can afford it.
“Every area in England is benefitting from the programme, with only a small variation in regional participation rates this academic year.”
